Fact 1: the Japanese version of the Master System had an add on that provided FM synthesis sound synthesis, and greatly improved its music. Many US-released games have support for the add-on, but it was never released over here so that feature remained unused.
Fact 2: A later revision of the hardware in Japan (there called the Master System) had the FM chip built in. This version could even mix together the system’s default sound with the FM chip. And, if you turned the system on without a game inserted, it played a special version of the Space Harrier theme, programmed to take advantage of both chips.
It’s information I’d much rather see in text, and I find the video a bit annoying from a construction standpoint (the speaker has a bad case of Youtube Voice), but it’s really interesting information regardless. This video from Abyssoft contains a deep explanation of MK64’s opponent driving algorithm, and explains that the game selects two rivals for your character on each cup, and that opposing drivers pick one of three paths through the course, and can clip right through walls if needed to continue driving around the circuit.
Have you ever played Defender? It’s amazingly difficult! It was described in Craig Kubey’s golden-era video game book The Winner’s Book of Video Games as like being locked in a closet with a swarm of killer bees, and the comparison is apt. It absolutely destroys inexperienced players, and the road to mastery is long. And yet, it can be mastered. People have flipped the score many times over, even if it’s difficult to see how.
This video (18 minutes) from Tim’s Tiny Arcade with Defender expert Joe Dearman explains some of the higher-level tactics of the game.
One thing it doesn’t explain, though, possibly because it’s a fairly basic piece of knowledge even if it’s not obvious at all, is the “International Date Line.” There is an invisible vertical line at a specific place in the game world where the internal coordinate system wraps around. When your ship is being chased by enemies, and you cross that line, pursuers suddenly drop their pursuit, because the x-coordinate comparison sends them all the way around the game world the other way. If you hang out around the IDL, you can immediately escape from chasing Swarmers and Mutants just by crossing it!
Greg’s Game Room on Youtube looked at 28 games with both NES and Commodore 64 versions. It’s not by any means all of them, but a good selection. Usually its the NES version that’s better, but there are some surprising upsets, especially if the game originated on a microcomputer platform.
The Commodore games that won out are Ballblazer, Castelian, Die Hard (but the C64 version’s really different), Ghostbusters, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins, Q*Bert and (surprisingly) Smash T.V. Decent C64 games that nevertheless lost are Blades of Steel, Commando, Donkey Kong, Mighty Bomb Jack and Super Mario Bros. (rated were both the similar Great Giana Sisters and the recent fanmade version of SMB that uses advanced scrolling tricks). Gyruss, Mario Bros. and Pac-Man were rated at a tie.
Sundry Sunday is when we present gaming culture finds from across the years and decades. We’ve changed things up a little for the season!
A Christmas Warol, from GabaLeth, is an entertaining remix of A Christmas Carol, starting Nintendo’s charmingly notorious money-grubbing libertarian.
It’s interesting to muse on how Wario has escaped popular condemnation for his capitalist ways, or at least aspirations? I think it’s partly because he’s an object of fun and not presented as a positive figure, the wa of warui, Japanese for bad, is right in his name. He’s also rarely successful, and sometimes implied (very vaguely) to have a good heart under there somewhere.
Anyway, here’s Wario as Ebenezer Scrooge. There’s four installments so far, and they’re all surprising short (although it never was a very long story); presumably there’ll be a fifth by the time you see this.
Another light post, usually I’d put this on Sunday but we’re so close to C-Day that it’d end up going up on the 24th. It’s the creator of Brawl in the Family, Matthew “BitFinity” Taranto, recorded Waluigi singing a duet with himself (who else?) of Baby It’s Cold Outside. “I like when you’re uncomfortably creepy!”
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
For a supposedly mature art form with (as we’re often reminded) revenue exceeding television and movies, and legions of fans ready to defend its honor in the gladiator pits of social media and discussion forums, it’s surprising how unexamined some video game tropes are.
Like, how so many games have decided that floating in the air and slowly rotating is a universal signal that an object can be collected? It’s ubiquitous! See for yourself:
What I especially like is how esoteric are a few of the games in this compilation of miscellaneous game collectables. I recognize both Ribbit King and ToeJam & Earl III (the often forgotten Xbox one) within this montage-like object!
If it’s generally entertaining, I try to save game-related animations and cartoons for Sundays, but this is probably interesting more for how it illustrates how the Pac-Man propery is changing. Yes, it’s another excuse to rant a bit about how Pac-Man’s lore is changing under Namco’s direction, like in the Baby Pac-Man post!
I recognize that Bally/Midway’s taking the lead on Pac-Man promotion and lore amounted to a bit of cultural chauvinism. In the early 80s, U.S. licensors of Japanese arcade games would outright put their own copyright notices on games. When I was a kid and Pac-Man fever was running at 104 degrees (Fahrenheit), I knew that Bally/Midway was a thing that existed, but nothing at all about Namco. They filled that widespread ignorance of the game’s origins with their own lore, starting with Ms. Pac-Man, and it’s surprising that now, long after their deal was dissolved and Midway games division consumer games division shut down, that their lore survived for so long.
Tengen’s first release of Pac-Man for NES, with Hanna-Barbera cartoon character designs. Image scavenged from an Ebay listing.
A lot of that has to do with the enduring popularity of Ms. Pac-Man. Other Bally contributions like Jr. Pac-Man haven’t proven nearly so enduring. Another part of the U.S. Pac-Man lore, that has ended up exerting a strong, almost unhealthy, influence over their property has been the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show, yes the one almost no one remembers except for its weird Christmas special, from 1982. That thing got two seasons, alongside likewise forgotten (and less durable) properties Richie Rich and The Little Rascals. H-B’s version of the characters continues to pop up randomly in different places, like the cover art for the original version of Tengen’s release of Pac-Man for NES.
The Hanna-Barbera cartoon was a strong influence over the art design and music of Pac-Land, which means among other things that that weird cartoon is now echoed in Smash Bros. Ultimate. Shh! No one tell Warner Bros!
Okay, time to spiral on down to the point of this post. A “pop-up store,” it seems, is a “retail concept” that involves setting up a small store for a limited period of time, often with a strong theme or a focus on a single brand. Kind of like a micro-sized version of Spirit Halloween.
Namco experimented with a Pac-Man-themed pop-up store in Japan in 2016. They called it “Pac-Store,” and they came up with its own idiosyncratic take on the Pac-Man lore for it, and made a series of short web cartoons to promote it. They’re still on Youtube, but they’re collected into one video by The Pac-Man Archive. That’s what is embedded below. Even though it’s mostly in Japanese you should watch a few minutes of it, if just to see how Namco has retconned the history of the hungry yellow sphere.
Like gag me with a spoon, it’s Pac-Marie! I love the Pac-gloves on this style of character.
From Ghostly Adventures: Pac-Man and friends who I don’t even care enough about to learn their names. UGH. That’s a lot of detail spent on the idea of Pac-shoes. Image from Gamespot.
Pac-Man has two assistants, but they’re not Ms. Pac-Man or Baby or Jr. They don’t even have “Pac-Mom,” Namco’s more-recent recreation of Ms. Pac that isn’t burdened by AtGames’ licensing with Ms. Pac-Man creator GCC. Instead, Pac is backed by “Pac-Marie” and “Pac-Little.” Keep in mind that the horrible “Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures” TV show was released around 2013, and its characters got unfortunately crammed into at least one iteration of Pac-Man Museum (the one I have on Steam). It’s interesting that they didn’t use those for Pac-Store. Maybe Namco was already coming to realize that Ghostly Adventures was destined for purgatory.
I actually don’t hate Pac-Marie, she’s got a fun design, and it’s not like Pac-People have much to distinguish them anyway. She’s still a hell of a lot more appealing than anything from Ghostly Adventures.
EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s that time of year again, when time is short and news is light. There are a lot of these Next Fest video showcases lined up, so there’ll probably be more than usual of these for the next couple of weeks.
Owner of Game Wisdom with more than a decade of experience writing and talking about game design and the industry. I’m also the author of the “Game Design Deep Dive” series and “20 Essential Games to Study”
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Welcome to a different sort of Sundry Sunday! This week, I’d figure I’d explain to you how weirdly seriously I find this section to do!
You might think just finding a random funny or weird game-related video on Youtube is the easiest cyberthing in the compuworld. It’s only been one of the most popular form of videos on Youtube since it started up. Newgrounds has been around for how long again?
Well, you see, that’s kind of the problem. Newgrounds is part of what I’m going to euphemistically call gamer culture, and that tends to be what I’m going to understatedly call extra. Surely I don’t need to go into the many excesses of gamerdom, at this late date.
So I have to choose carefully. And it’s not just gamer culture I have to carefully circumnavigate, but some other examples of the excesses of fandom.
I figured I’d illustrate by showing a couple of videos that I would not otherwise present in this forum, and note why I wouldn’t. Let us away!
The Ultimate “Super Mario Bros Wonder” Recap Cartoon
The word “Ultimate” is in the title. It doesn’t reflect my feelings.
This one’s borderline. The opening gag of Bowser turning into a salaryman is a good one. But then a flower starts cussing Mario out, and Luigi slaps the ass of Elephant Daisy. And British hunters poach Elephant Mario, and Mario gets cussed at some more and gets squished to paste inside an inchworm pipe. And there’s a Lion King parody that is just a reference without a point. And then Peach grabs a Wonder Flower, making an enemy bulk up like on steroids, and reacts with anticipation as it then approaches her. You know. “Adult” humor.
“Adult” humor is a difficult thing to apply well. Just having kids’ characters react in such untoward ways is not a positive or negative on its own, but that is my point, just that isn’t enough for me to recommend a video. It feels like I’m recommending a Family Guy sketch, a style of animated comedy of which I’ll litotically say I’m not a fan.
Furthermore, the whole video is just a series of vignettes like that. A single funny joke in a video has to carry the weight of the whole rest of it. I’m not going to say this video is sloppy because obvious effort went into animating it, and there’s even some good ideas in there. But there’s always going to be reasons not to link to something, all it takes is one, and I knew it wasn’t going to be right for Sundry Sunday (outside this context) the moment Luigi slapped Daisy’s butt. Sometimes I despair of finding something good to put in on Sunday, but I’d rather not present a culture find that week at all than one that crosses a grossness line. That’s just me, but then, I’m me, and I’m writing this.
This video has the opposite problem. And it’s not really a problem, I’d say, it’s fine, it’s not intended as a value judgement against it, except that, by rejecting it for here (again, outside of this context), I am unavoidably judging it by a value, the value of being right for Sundry Sunday. What I mean to say is, it isn’t bad. I just can’t quite bring myself to say it’s good.
What causes me to reject this one is two things: it’s not funny, and on top of that, it’s kind of glurgy.
In summary: in the universe of the recent Super Mario Bros. movie, Mario and Luigi’s old boss, Foreman Spike, comes into a room to find them messing up on a job, and at first berates them for poor work, but then eases up and has a bonding moment with his two employees, fixing the leak himself while telling him a story of his own early career. And that’s really it. It’s supposed to be heartwarming, but it comes off as ingratiating.
It might work better if there was more at stake. If we had a bit more prior insight into Spike’s character (he’s not a big part of the movie). I’m not as concerned with the fact that the video is just a voiceover of a dramatic presentation of a fancomic, I’ve presented things like that here before.
I don’t dislike it, but I think the bar for inclusion here is a little higher.
Over on Mastodon, Dan Fixes Coin-Ops has been documenting an epic quest: the repair of a Baby Pac-Man machine.
It’s one of the non-Namco Pac-Man spinoffs that Bally/Midway released in the wake of the original’s extremely high popularity. I’d like to remind readers that while Namco has been the sole beneficiary of Pac-Man’s heights lately, the original game, at first called Puck-Man in Japan, was not popular there. The spin-offs, console ports, handheld games, trading cards, stickers, clothing, cartoon show, Christmas special, breakfast cereal and unnumbered other items, that was all Bally/Midway’s doing. Toru Iwatani created and designed it, his team made it into a game and cabinet, Namco released it in Japan to middling success, and from there Bally/Midway got behind it and turned it into one of the most gigantic video game hits there’s ever been, a machine that at one point had one hundred thousand units.
Now, I’m not going to deny that their effort led to some erasure of knowledge of Namco’s existence at the time. All those Pac-Man machines and spin-offs mentioned “Bally Midway Mfg. Co.,” with nary a mention of Namco. But it’s undeniable now that erasure is happening in the other direction: a search over the History page on official Pac-Man website has no mention of Bally at all, even though the page acknowledges that the game was “a major hit in the United States.”
Some of that success leaked back to Japan and fueled some Namco-made sequels: Super Pac-Man, Pac N Pal, Pac-Land, Pac-Mania, Pac-Man Arrangement and eventually Pac-Man Battle Royale and Pac-Man Championship Edition, and more recently things like World’s Largest Pac-Man and Pac-Man Battle Royale Chompionship.
Bally/Midway made their own sequels. One of those, Ms. Pac-Man (created by GCC), came to eclipse the original in popularity, but in addition to their licensing of Super Pac-Man and Pac N Pal they made Jr. Pac-Man (also from GCC), as well as Professor Pac-Man and this game here. The one Dan Fixes Coin-Ops repaired. Baby Pac-Man.
Baby Pac-Man is a game that only could be made by Bally, because it’s a video game/pinball hybrid.
Bally, together with the company that would buy them, Williams, is arguably the greatest pinball maker there’s ever been. Up until around 2000 (a heartbreaking year) they made wonderful machines like The Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Attack From Mars, Star Trek: The Next Generation and quite a few others. In 1982 though pinball was in a slump while video games had reign over arcades. The decision to make a game that connected one of the greatest arcade games of all with pinball must have seemed obvious. (It wasn’t their only attempt to capitalize on their golden license with a pinball table, witness Mr. & Mrs. Pac-Man, which I’m informed was released eight months before Baby Pac-Man.)
The combination of an arcade video game and pinball makes for a unique experience. It also makes for a game which breaks down even more often than your standard arcade game, as the thread notes: there’s three computers in the thing, and it’s subject to all the typical arcade game problems, all the typical pinball problems, and special problems with the portions of the machine that connect the two halves together.
The thread begins memorably:
In case y’all were tired of hearing about popular Fediverse people making bad decisions, just thought I’d let y’all know I bought a 1980’s hybrid pinball/videogame tonight
Like this isn’t for a client, I’m not working on it to earn. This game COST money. This is my game now, I paid for it and it lives in my house. I’m not gonna get to give anybody a bill.
This is such a perversion of the natural order of things. I’ll probably route it one day, but for now this is an arcade machine that I SPEND money on!
It’s taken me a little while to get it into the house and have a chat with the mate who sold it to me and let the littleun have a go and put her to bed and fix a couple things and have a go myself so I’ve not been catching up on my notifications, I saw some questions so I’ll do a little thread on it over the next couple of days
I cannot stress enough that you should not buy one of these things
Folk who like 80’s pinball want stuff like this or Haunted House and you shouldn’t buy a Haunted House either
These are games for pinball techs or people with money to hire pinball techs or very close friends of pinball techs
Except Baby Pac-Man needs you to be friends with an arcade tech too.
He finally got it working after three months of work, and what a journey it is. He did it for love of the game: while Baby Pac-Man is dissed in some circles it’s a genuinely interesting game. But to like it, you have to abandon the relatively lenient expectations of classic arcade video games. Pinball is inherently unfair, and that unfairness oozes out and coats even the video portion of Baby Pac: the ghosts don’t waste time in coming after you, and you start with no Energizers: you have to earn them in the pinball portion, which for the most part you can only visit once per life/board. You can return to the video portion temporarily though by locking the ball in a scoop.
Here is the full thread (to date) in Masto Reader, which is a Mastodon version of Threadreader. It takes maybe half a minute to collect the posts and present them though, so to read the whole saga you’ll have to be a little patient.
An interesting video about Baby Pac-Man (although with some bad sound) District 82 Pinball’s here (12 minutes), which covers the tech and gameplay:
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Did I post this one before? An archives search doesn’t turn it up. It’s been in my topic list for a long time, but it seems I never actually post it it. Here it is! It was created by Doctor Octoroc, who still has a website, for CollegeHumor, which doesn’t!
The video is 11 years old, and doesn’t present all of the events of the series, I think because it hadn’t concluded at that point. Still, it may be entertaining.
